Books I completed in 2021: A year in review

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.” ―?Charles W. Eliot

For me, Year 2021 was good and bad both.

Working from home because of pandemic results in saving huge amount of time that can be considered as best investment one can make on himself/herself and the bad part is I also got Covid infected during April 2021.

With respect to technology in the year 2021, I paid a great attention to GoLang, Cloud (AWS, GCP and Azure), Networking in Cloud, Kafka and Data in general. I also read some non-technical books and loved them fully.

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Here is list of some of the books and courses I completed in the year 2021.

1) Inner Engineering Sadhguru’s?Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy?presents the western readers with a path to achieve a complete sense of well-being through yoga for the very first time. In this philosophical book, Sadhguru narrates his own story of His awakening, right from childhood to his time as an avid bike rider when he had crossed the Indian subcontinent on his motorcycle. Read this book and get inspired by Sadhguru’s life and teachings.

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2) Ayurvedic Cooking for Self-Healing

I haven't completely read this book, but me and my wife refer this frequently. This book is great for beginners who wants to learn the art of healing with food. This book covers following.

• The principles of Ayurveda and chart for determining your individual constitution.
• Maintaining one's health, digestion and constitutional balance.
• A listing of the qualities of foods and their effects on the doshas.
• Setting up of an Ayurvedic kitchen and planning menus for every member of your family.
• More than 100 recipes of delicious Ayurvedic cuisine.
• Nearly 300 simple remedies for everything-from the common cold and skin problems to stabilising blood sugar in diabetics - all using familiar household herbs, fruits and vegetables!

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3) Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang: Move beyond basic programming to design and build reliable software with clean code

This Golang book distills industry best practices for writing lean Go code that is easy to test and maintain, and helps you to explore its practical implementation by creating a multi-tier application

Key Features

• Apply best practices to produce lean, testable, and maintainable Go code to avoid accumulating technical debt
• Explore Go’s built-in support for concurrency and message passing to build high-performance applications
• Scale your Go programs across machines and manage their life cycle using Kubernetes

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4) Building Distributed Applications in Gin: A hands-on guide for Go developers to build and deploy distributed web apps with the Gin framework

An effective guide to learning how to build a large-scale distributed application using the wide range of functionalities in Gin. Gin is a high-performance HTTP web framework used to build web applications and microservices in Go. This book is designed to teach you the ins and outs of the Gin framework with the help of practical examples.

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5) Designing Data-Intensive Applications

I read this book in 2020 as well partially but read it again in 2021. In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. It will provide you enough details to figure out the appropriate data approach for your system no matter how big the scale is. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications.

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6) Networking & Kubernetes: A Layered Approach

It covers: The Kubernetes networking model The CNCF Container Network Interface Project and how to choose the best interface for your clusters The networking and Linux primitives that power Kubernetes How to quickly troubleshoot networking issues and prevent downtime Cloud networking and Kubernetes with the three major providers: AWS, GCP, and Azure The pros and cons of various network tools--and how to select the best ones for your stack

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7) 97 Things Every SRE Should Know?

Readers looking for guidance on where to start first can jump right to the section that applies most to them; however, you will still find value in reading essays from sections that don’t currently apply to your day-to-day.?

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8) Becoming a Data Head

Best thing about this book is its remarkable breadth of topics covered, while maintaining a healthy depth in the content presented for each topic.?Alex and Jordan have put together a must read whether you are just starting your journey or already in the thick of it. They made this com- plex space simple by breaking down the “data process” into understandable patterns and using everyday examples and events over our history to make the concepts relatable.?

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9) Chaos Engineering

Chaos Engineering was born of necessity in a complex distributed software system.?Thousands of companies of all shapes and sizes, in all verticals, have adopted Chaos Engineering as a core practice to make their products and services safer and more reliable. Nora and Casey set out to write the most complete book on Chaos Engineering.??

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10) Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) for .NET Devs

The Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr) provides APIs that simplify microservice connectivity. Whether your communication pattern is service to service invocation or pub/sub messaging, Dapr helps you write resilient and secured microservices. By letting Dapr’s sidecar take care of the complex challenges such as service discovery, message broker integration, encryption, observability, and secret management, you can focus on business logic and keep your code simple.

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11) Kafka : The Definitive Guide

Apache Kafka is a community distributed event streaming platform capable of handling trillions of events a day. In this free e-book, you'll get full introduction to Apache Kafka??, the distributed, publish-subscribe queue for handling real-time data feeds.??Learn how Kafka works, internal architecture, what it's used for, and how to take full advantage of Kafka stream processing technology.

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12) Mastering Apache Pulsar

Every enterprise application creates data, including log messages, metrics, user activity, and outgoing messages. Learning how to move these items is almost as important as the data itself. If you’re an application architect, developer, or production engineer new to Apache Pulsar, this practical guide shows you how to use this open source event streaming platform to handle real-time data feeds.?

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13) Java Challenges

This book is explicitly not intended for programming novices but is aimed for readers who already have basic or even good knowledge of Java and want to deepen it with exercises.?Here you will find a wide range of practice exercises on a broad mix of topics that will improve your knowledge in an entertaining way. It can also help prepare you for job interviews and will certainly help improve your problem-solving skills.?

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14) Spring REST

This book served a refresher course for me .Spring REST serves as a practical guide for designing and developing RESTful APIs using the popular Spring Framework. This book begins with a brief introduction to REST, HTTP, and web infrastructure. It then provides detailed coverage of several Spring portfolio projects such as Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Data JPA, and Spring Security.?

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